Printing systems often comprise varying combinations of clients, print servers, and networked printers that serve the needs of different users. Often, printers are shared across multiple users in an office. This is generally desirable because each user in the office will have access to the entire range of printing capabilities of the printer (e.g., color printing, photocopying, etc.). However, sharing a printer across an office brings with it a number of potential disadvantages. For example, a user may desire to print confidential information from the printer. If this user is located away from the printer when they submit the job, they will be unable to secure the printed confidential information until they arrive at the printer. This in turn means that the confidential information could be compromised if an unauthorized person viewed the printed job as it waited for pickup at the printer. In a further example, it may be desirable to limit printer access to specific authorized individuals, in order to ensure that the printer is used for business purposes and not personal purposes.
To address these concerns, printers often operate in a secure mode. In secure mode, jobs submitted for printing are held at a print server. The printer refrains from printing the submitted jobs until a user accesses a console at the printer and enters the proper credentials. When the credentials are submitted to the printer, the printer retrieves print jobs for the user stored at the print server. The printer then initiates printing of the jobs. Unfortunately, using a printer in a secure mode may be tedious and time-consuming, because each time a user sends a job to the printer, the user may need to visit the printer and authorize the submitted job.